The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors

by John W. Compton

Overview

When polling data showed that an overwhelming 81% of white evangelicals had voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, commentators across the political spectrum were left aghast. Even for a community that had been tracking further and further right for decades, this support seemed decidedly out of step. How, after all, could an amoral, twice-divorced businessman from New York garner such devoted admiration from the most vociferous of "values voters?" That this same group had, not a century earlier, rallied national support for such progressive causes as a federal minimum wage, child labor laws, and civil rights made the Trump shift even harder to square.

In The End of Empathy, John W. Compton presents a nuanced portrait of the changing values of evangelical voters over the course of the last century. To explain the rise of white Protestant social concern in the latter part of the nineteenth century and its sudden demise at the end of the twentieth, Compton argues that religious conviction, by itself, is rarely sufficient to motivate empathetic political behavior. When believers do act empathetically—championing reforms that transfer resources or political influence to less privileged groups within society, for example—it is typically because strong religious institutions have compelled them to do so.

Citizens throughout the previous century had sought membership in churches as a means of ensuring upward mobility, but a deterioration of mainline Protestant authority that started in the 1960s led large groups of white suburbanites to shift away from the mainline Protestant churches. There to pick up the slack were larger evangelical congregations with conservative leaders who discouraged attempts by the government to promote a more equitable distribution of wealth and political authority. That shift, Compton argues, explains the larger revolution in white Protestantism that brought us to this political moment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190069186
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/03/2020
Pages:	408
Sales rank:	226,310
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

John W. Compton is Associate Professor of Political Science at Chapman University and the author of The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: The Age of Stewardship

1. The Road to Armageddon
2. The Brief Reign of Whirl
3. The Churches Do Their Part

Part II: Why the Center Held

4. The Battle for the Clergy
5. Assaulting the Citadel
6. Inventing the Old-Time Religion
7. Last Hurrah: The Civil Rights Act of 1964

Part III: From Revelation to Rationalization

8. Revolt in the Suburbs
9. The Great Unraveling
10. Enter the Family
11. A Movement in Name Only

Epilogue: White Protestants in the Age of Trump

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Compton seeks to explain support for Donald Trump among American Protestants, suggesting that the empathy religious voters had previously demon-strated for underprivileged groups had been compelled by mainline Protestant churches that, beginning in the 1960s, increasingly lost members to evangelical churches opposing government efforts to more equitably distribute wealth and political power." — Survival: Global Politics and Strategy

"Why are white evangelicals so supportive of Donald Trump, when in the past evangelicals were often on the side of progressive social reforms? Many have attempted to answer that question by looking only to the present. In this book John Compton takes a longer view, convincingly arguing that the Religious Right emerged to fill the vacuum left when mainline Protestantism lost its authoritative voice in American public life. This book is required reading for anyone trying to make sense of the contemporary American religious landscape." — David Campbell, Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy, University of Notre Dame

"As a former pastor who spent my life in the milieu described in John Compton's new book, I read with it with both personal and professional interest. Well-written and energetically researched, The End of Empathy overturned several of my previously settled assumptions, and forced me to see many of my own struggles and perplexities in a new light. Most importantly, it convinced me that evangelical leaders of the Religious Right have not actually been religious leaders; rather, they have been social mirrors, following their white flocks into a form of backlash politics that reflects their racial anxieties and resentments. An important book, especially in this conflicted time." — Brian D. McLaren, author of The Great Spiritual Migration

"A comprehensive, balanced, and insightful review of the liberal American Protestant story."—Kirkus

"Compton has written a...nuanced historical study on the loss of Protestant social influence in America.... [He argues that] the waning of [religious] authority in the 1960s and 1970s under such forces as individualism and suburbanization...led to the loss of a distinctly religious politics and the emergence of a situation where it is increasingly politics that determines religion rather than the other way around." —Religion Watch

"The End of Empathy will become an immediate classic in American political and religious history. [It] unearths a mountain of empirical data to support some of the darker truths that many liberals have been reluctant to accept about the rightward trend of American Protestant and evangelical institutions." —Los Angeles Review of Books

From the Publisher

2020-06-10
The rise and fall of progressive American Protestant leadership.

Political science professor Compton provides a historical review of the role of social justice and reform within white Protestant churches in the U.S., noting that the importance of social issues through much of American history was especially related to the authority of church leaders and the strength of denominational and ecumenical organizations. However, as the author shows, after more than a century of such authority tying together the activities of American churches, these structures fell apart rapidly beginning in the turbulent 1960s, opening the way to a starkly different religious landscape in the modern U.S. Compton begins by exploring the unique American view—beginning with the Puritans—“that Americans were duty bound to remake society in preparation for the coming of the Kingdom”—a view that situated the concept of sin as communal in nature. From that view arose the Protestant movements against slavery and other social ills. Compton notes that in the 19th century, the power of progressive denominational authorities was joined by a social need for professionals to belong to established churches, a trend that sociologist Max Weber explored during the Progressive Era. Among the many high-water marks in the history of progressive Protestantism’s firm grip on the rudder of public affairs were temperance, suffrage, New Deal social programs, and the struggle for civil rights. Multifaceted changes in society, however, from the rise of Evangelicalism to the radicalism of Vietnam-era protests, led to the near collapse of once-mighty Protestant denominations and related ecumenical networks. As Compton chronicles, there followed the rise of the religious right and the increasing disregard for edicts from progressive church leadership, trends that seem to have found their apotheosis in the form of evangelical support for Donald Trump.

A comprehensive, balanced, and insightful review of the liberal American Protestant story.

Kirkus Reviews